Plugins & Themes

Hybrid Core version 1.5

Since August, I’ve been working away at version 1.5 of Hybrid Core. It’s been a long road getting this release ready. There were so many new features added that it needed the extra time for additional testing.

Today, I am happy to announce that Hybrid Core 1.5 is officially out. You can grab the latest copy from the Hybrid Core page.

What’s new?

One of the biggest changes I’ve made is I’ve gone through and updated the formatting on a large portion of the code to make it even easier for developers to read. I’ll continue this process through version 1.6 as well. Several bugs have also been squashed as a direct result of community input and feedback.

While the following is not a complete list of all the changes, it does represent the major areas (plus features) that were added or modified in this release.

New tutorials

Other things of note

SEO: As of today, I am officially announcing that themes built off the Hybrid Core framework should not use the Hybrid Core SEO feature any longer. The code was originally added to the framework because it was for my personal blog. Well, the entire framework was originally built for my personal blog. However, this is obviously no longer the case. This has been an unwritten rule for some time. I’m just making it official now.

SEO is better handled by plugins like WP SEO, which is the SEO plugin that I officially endorse. I will also be more than happy to help anyone who has used this feature in the past port their data over to the plugin.

Hybrid theme stylesheets: In version 1.6, the following Hybrid theme stylesheets (located in /library/css) will be removed from the framework.

2c-l-fixed.css

2c-r-fixed.css

3c-l-fixed.css

3c-r-fixed.css

3c-c-fixed.css

holy-grail-fluid.css

plugins.css

screen.css

These files have long been moved to the Hybrid theme’s /css folder. There’s no need for them to be in the framework taking up space on users’ sites who do not use that theme.

So, if you’re importing any of those stylesheets, make sure to import them from the correct place. I’m more than willing to help you out with this in the support forums if you need help.

Like Sami, I’m also very interested about the Styles Loader. I read the book SMACSS that encourages to separate styles in categories like base, layout, modules, states and theme. I like what I read and I started to apply this in my styles. ‘Cause of this the Styles Loader is a very welcome feature for me!

One of the reasons I had renamed “Post Layouts” to “Theme Layouts” early on was because I felt that the feature needed to be more than just a per-post thing. Then, when the theme customizer came out and I’d helped Sami work on global layouts for one of his themes, it just made sense to go ahead and build it in.

If you decide you don’t want a global layout option though, you can always disable it.

Regarding the letting go of Hybrid SEO, I am asking if you could make a plugin out of it and put it in WordPress.org ‘s repo ? This way both Hybrid users who’s been using this part can still keep using it and WordPress community can use it too.

Not everyone wants all the features of Yoast’s plugin, it’s a great but a bit overkill in some aspect. Hybrid SEO is light and to the point.

It’ll be a long, long time before this feature is removed from the framework, if ever. I’ll probably still be using it as long as I have a blog. I’m simply telling theme authors not to enable the feature by default in their theme.

Sorry if I was unclear in the post. As a user, you’ll still be able to enable it if you want to use it.

How will we know when a theme has been updated in order to function fully with the newest Hybrid core 1.5? Will they have new version number? Will you post an announcement? Personally I’m very interested in knowing whether or not “structure” is all ready to go for hybrid core 1.5.